walks from Chalmersquoy to Cleatonbrae,
enumerates 114 males, 121 females.
The spring of his pocket watch is slack,
the sole of his left boot has come away.

46 North Parish

South of the iron gate,
two rooms,
roof sealed with lime.

A starfish is washed up on the step.
Outside a platform of flags
prised from the shore.

The fields at the back dip and rise,
where the Scollays of Ha’gock
wear paths up to the brae, down to the shore.

The Pier

crawls from an outcrop
on tortoise legs,
part boulder part slab.
Barnacles thicken its joints
and one wedge has dived
into the sand.
High tide, it slinks
between banners of kelp,
kisses the bellies of seals.

Wren on the track to Sandquoy

her notes struck from glasses
in the press at Brough.

Her wings handles of a bowl
carved for the bridal.

The wind unspools her over gorse,
over the flags of the slap.

The Aurora Comes Home

George lowers the sails.
Euphane spreads the catch on the stones.
Sea wallops their door, sucks under the flags,
whispers into the sand at the base of the house.
She’s scratched her name over the hearth.
Wisps of hair pulled from her brush
bowl over the fields to Cleat,
past the pool, the base of the kiln,
across the ridge of brown weed.
The noust is full, the oars point to the moon.

.

After retirement from teaching, Lydia Harris made her home in the Orkney Island of Westray.

BELLA WITH WHITE COLLAR*‘Dressed all in white or all in black, she has long been
haunting my paintings, the great central image of my art.’ Chagall.

All I had to do was open my window
and in streamed the blueness of the sky,
love and flowers for my beloved Bella.

We were alone at last in the country:
the pig in the sty and the horse in the field,
the moon climbing high behind the trees.

Married we could fly to our canvas heaven:
waltzing wild flowers round a warm kitchen.The Birthday became Bella with White Collar,

and she is wilder than the harvest bells,
the clouds and the threshing trees,
the man and child I walk into my paintings.

I am The Poet Reclining in my field,
though I refused to call my paintings poetry.
I refused to call my paintings anything.

‘How could you?’ the hostile crowd demanded.
Bread and circuses said Comrade Lenin.
But it was the acrobats who caught my eye.

And the flowers. When my fiddler returned,
he was still The Green Violinist.
Nothing could be the same when the colours died.

.

*1917

.

William Bedford’s poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in over a hundred magazines worldwide. His Collecting Bottle Tops: Selected Poetry 1960-2008 was published in 2009. His selected short stories and non-fiction, None of the Cadillacs Was Pink, was also published in 2009. He was on the Editorial Board of Poetry Salzburg Review from 2007 to 2016, and was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University from 2008 to 2011.

All the Relevant Gods has an impressive range of reference which bestows a strong sense of authority on its tone. It is geographically various but sure-footed in its evocation of here versus elsewhere, and it manages to ground its more abstract references, to science and music, in a vivid concreteness, so that it deploys the specific to hint evocatively at larger concerns.

Austin Davis is a young poet living in Mesa, Arizona. Austin has been published widely, and most recently his work can be found in Pif Magazine and Folded Word. The Moon and Her Ocean (Fowlpox Press) was published in 2017, and currently, Austin is working with Moran Press on a full length collection.

Ceinwen previously worked as a Probation Officer, a Mental Health Social Worker and Practice Educator. She lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and writes short stories and poetry. She has been published in web magazines and print anthologies. These include Fiction on the Web, Literally Stories, Alliterati, Stepaway,Poets Speak (whilst they still can), Three Drops from the Cauldron, Obsessed with Pipework, Picaroon, Amaryllis, Algebra of Owls, Write to be Counted, The Lake and Riggwelter. She graduated from her MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University in December 2017. She believes everyone’s voice counts.

Half past ten on a Sunday night
He says, don’t read Bukowski
He’ll get under your skin.
I won’t, I say.
I don’t even know who Bukowski is
Until he pulls out a broken book.

If you can’t drink like a pro, he says
Fight with your fists, he says
Sleep with crazy women
And nail words to the page
Don’t read Bukowski.
I won’t, I say and check my phone.

Half past ten on a Sunday night
The pub is a holding pen for the hopeless
And he’s been my best friend for nearly an hour.
He shows me a pad splattered with scribble
And offers to read me some words
But then loses his balance
And ends up on the floor.

Outside, on the beer beaten streets
I check the kebab shop and see it empty.
The owner is slumped at the counter
Defeat written all over his shish-meat face
His empty-till eyes just begging me to come in
And save him from everything that’s bad in the world
But we both know it’s too late for any of that.

Half past ten on a Sunday night
Nobody gets out alive.

.

Fletcher works as a cold call salesman by day, and run London Experimental Film Festival and write raw poetry by night. He has been published in: Poetry Bus, E-List, Northern Lights. Fletcher write poetry that’s honest, written from the gut, nailed to the page.

Desire ‘The widow wants only to speak to the dead one, to sustain and preserve him’ Sandra M. Gilbert

No more Minions
for you and me I thought
in the shadow of Caradon Hill
in the car going to register your death

no more wincing at ‘Cheesewring’
no more hoofing round the Hurlers
no more hand outstretched
to hoist me up slippery slopes

no more uphill ‘push push push’
in your Ganges instructor voice
no more lone black sheep
surprised beside the old mine

or pony with hanging dong or wind song
in the transmitter`s wires
no more photos of you on top of the world
or ‘Cheers’ with tea-filled travel mugs

no more gentlemanly turned back as I
peed behind rocks unable to master
the Shewee you bought as a gift
no more striding out together

no more walking talks about
sex and death and absurdity
no more getting lost in each other
no more Minions for us

*envoi*
I trust that two foot long
luminous phallus we stumbled upon
in the bitter cold scrub
is still out there

Gilbert, S.M., (2006), Death`s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, New York: Norton, p.37

.

Sandra Tappenden is the author of poetry collections ‘Speed’ (Salt, 2007), and ‘Bags of Mostly Water’ (Original plus, 2003). She has written reviews, performed in an improv outfit called Juice, and had work in anthologies such as ‘Identity Parade’ (Bloodaxe, 2010), and ‘From Hepworth`s Garden Out’ (Shearsman, 2010). She once interviewed Marina Warner at Ways with Words and was terrified. Currently working on her dissertation for an English and Creative Writing BA at Plymouth University.

happened as trees do slowly
Each new twig a parting
Of the ways continually
A place the birds could sing,
Reading the Braille of sky
And now it sieves the light
For nuggets of gold

To cast a shadowy forest
On the walls of our study,
Its branches fruited with books,
A cold coffee, two laptops.
It watches us. The dog
With eyes of Baltic amber
The cat’s whiskers

Spun from sunlight, your face
Enraptured as the jay alights,
His wings with epaulettes
Of summer sky. One day
We will stop talking and listen
To the most important thing
It has to say. For now it signs

With many hands, frantically,
Being deaf. I listen but don’t see.

.

Steve Komarnyckyj’s literary translations and poems have appeared in Index on Censorship, Modern Poetry in Translation and many other journals. He is the holder of two PEN awards and a highly regarded English language poet whose work has been described as articulating “what it means to be human” (Sean Street). He runs Kalyna Language Press with his partner Susie and three domestic cats.

Zaffar Kunial published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust the same year. In 2011 he won third prize in the National Poetry Competition with ‘Hill Speak’.

With Steve Ely, Denise Riley and Warsan Shire, he contributed to The Pity, a series of new poems commissioned and published by the Poetry Society as a response to the centenary of the First World War. The Pity commissions were premiered live at Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, on 2 October, National Poetry Day, 2014, accompanied by background visuals by Robert Peake.
.

They should have been here for your birthday
– like that time decades back on Europa Point
when we watched them fizzing over Morocco
in crystal air unspoiled by streetlight, & I felt
we were in a lifesize model of the cosmos
assembled round us precisely as per the diagram,
words coming easily & life running forward
on rails from that conjunction.…………………………………This time
English cloud screened the sky & I could see
only the trail of occasional corpuscles firing hot
in ageing eyes, the wink of aircraft wingtip lights,
two-thirds of the Plough at intervals.…………………………………………Had therefore
to imagine the commotion of this year’s crop
of star-chips flaming out as each one traced its slash
of sidereal script on night’s cupola, to kid myself
as usual that they were writing it for you.

.

Steve Xerri has been a teacher, musician, illustrator and web designer but now prefers writing poetry and making pottery. Published last year in Acumen, Clear Poetry, Stride Magazine, Brittle Star and The Interpreter’s House, shortlisted for the Fish Publishing competition, won the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year 2017 competition, with two poems included in the Festival Anthology. Another poem is due for publication in spring 2018 in Ink Sweat & Tears, as well as one in Envoi.